The Central and Union Pacific Railroads joined their construction efforts on May 10, 1869 in Promontory, Utah, with the ceremonial driving of the Golden Spike into the track that joined East and West. One hundred years later, on July 20, 1969, two Americans landed on the moon. While railroads transformed commerce, communication, and travel in the United States, Moon landings abruptly stopped with no commercial benefits after six missions. Bill Kaysing thinks he knows why. 

Kaysing claims in his book We Never Went to the Moon that the missions were a scam. After a number of technological mishaps, NASA realized it did not have the expertise to make President Kennedy’s dream of putting a man on the Moon before the close of the decade a reality. To avoid shutting down NASA, losing funding, and giving the Soviet Union a reason to believe that America was behind them in missile design, an elaborate hoax was supposedly concocted to fool the world. Taking a page from Hollywood, Kaysing claims that an elaborate Moon-set was constructed somewhere in the Southwest region of the United States. What we saw on television during those eventful days was special effects, “a near seamless piece of performance art.” The only real things the public saw were an empty Saturn V rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and the return of the astronauts in a sealed “dummy space capsule that was dropped from a C5-A transport plane.”

Nearly everyone was in on the hoax, even Walter Cronkite! Anyone who tried to blow the lid off the planned ruse would pay the ultimate price. As a warning, so Kaysing theorizes, three astronauts were killed in a launchpad “accident” on January 27, 1967, mostly to keep Gus Grissom quiet. Grissom had been complaining about safety issues and threatened to go public. Again, this is according to Kaysing. If any of this story sounds familiar, you might remember the 1978 movie Capricorn One, starring O.J. Simpson, Telly Savalas, Elliott Gould, and James Brolin. The movie was about a faked mission to Mars. The only difference is that these astronauts had a conscience and wanted to get the true story out to the world.

There are millions of people who believe Kaysing is on to something. Mistrust of the government runs deep. But if it’s all true, why have so many people been able to keep the secret for so long? This is where all conspiracy theories break down. Too many people have to keep too many secrets for too long.